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Sunday, 13 April 2014

Pibot so far.

With a zumo chassis and mini motors, a pi model A, ultrasonics, line followers, laser, camera with pan and tilt, building plate from the little British robot company and a 4tronix MicRoCon robot control board I set to work.

My first problem was the building board was slightly to wide but the guys at @tlbrc soon had a replacement sent to me ready to go.

I have already made a basic robot with the chassis as featured on previous blogs but now was to start preparing for pibot wars at Cambridge raspberry jam this December.

Pibot v1

So now I had all the bits it was a case of using spacers to build the platform and screw in all the sensors. Once sensors were in place I had to use gorilla glue to secure them a bit better.

But as I started to build the sensors I decided it needed more plate at the front and at the same time try and keep the centre of gravity at the centre.

Once the glue had dried I was to this stage.

Once I got to this stage it was a case of gluing the pan and tilt camera to the top of pi as this was the best place for it and gravity.

Now I had to wire it all up, notice that I got the pan n tilt motors in wrong section of the motor board, I've since corrected this thanks to Gareth at 4tronix for guiding me on this.

The wiring was fed through the build board holes and then under the pi to keep the wiring tidy and out of the way but was struggling due to the jerky cable length.

Next was to tidy the cables up, I decided to use electrical tape, a job for later is to use red electrical tape to give this a red look.

Now all I have left is to wire up the motors again, stick the build board to the chassis, add camera although I have the long camera cable in place ready. I also need to add a usb power pack to run the pi and use the scratch gpio program to run some tests to make sure everything works fine.

Some more cosmetics work will be needed but due to size I'm limited in building any cover over it but will look around for something to put on it to make it cosmetically sound.

Look out for future posts as I get further on with this project, thanks for reading.